What is it?

The Polar Express is an arcade adventure game,
linked with the animated film of the same name. As you’d expect,
they’ve employed a good few of the actors from the film including
Jim Hanks (Tom Hanks’ brother), Daryl Sabara (Spy Kids) and Nona
Gaye (The Matrix movies). Some of the animated cut-scenes are taken
directly from the film.

This game is clearly aimed at people much younger
than me, so I’ve asked Purple Bear (my 10-year old daughter) for
some comments. Her comments are in bold italic text at
the end of the review.

Is there a
plot?

I wouldn’t say there is
much of a plot to this game. I would say it has a premise: boy
doubts existence of Santa Claus, magical train (the eponymous Polar
Express) shows up to take him to find Santa at North Pole. But
beyond that, the rest of the game is about the adventures of ‘Hero
Boy’ – they never even give him a name, nor any of the other
children, for that matter. Though having said there’s no plot, most
of the puzzles do appear to tell aspects of the story of the film,
as far as I can tell, not having seen the film.

The first half of the
game takes place on the Polar Express itself; the second half, at
the North Pole – or at least, the story-teller’s version of how the
North Pole looks. Of course, as we’re dealing with the modern
version of Santa Claus, the North Pole consists of an enormous city
and factory that is populated by elves, presents and lots of
machinery.

How do you
play?

This game is played in
the third person, with keyboard controls. That’s not as bad as it
sounds, as there are only nine controls – movement, primary and
secondary actions, jump and a perspective switch – you can flip the
camera to face Hero Boy in most situations. This perspective switch
comes in handy on several of the games where you have to traverse a
train carriage in one direction and then return to where you
started.

Without wishing to spoil
any surprises, the games consist of simple avoidance tasks, throwing
games (including a food fight!), a game like “Simple Simon Says”, a
ski race, and so on. You even get to control a zeppelin and a
runaway train carriage; well, I say control, but… well, you’ll find
out what I mean. The only game I found difficult was an old-style
platform game section, where you’re making your way up a mountain of
gifts, with jumps, moving platforms, swinging ribbons, extra bouncy
toy boxes, and bouncing presents as hazards. If it hadn’t been for
this section, I doubt the basic game would have lasted more than 3
hours for me.

Notable
Features

To complete the whole
game, rather than just playing through the sections, you need to
find the hidden toy pieces. These unlock eight items of additional
content – movie excerpts, music, and access to some of the mini
games in a form that can be played for points or against the clock.
Those games have high-score tables too.

Every mini game is
introduced by simple instructions, so that there’s rarely any doubts
as to what you need to do.

Initially, I was
concerned about the stability of this game – the introductory movie
causes a crash-to-desktop every time I play it (in exactly the same
spot every time), but apart from this, the game was very stable,
with just a few graphical and audio græmlins from time to time.

Any other
novelties?

The most novel of the
mini games, as far as I was concerned, was the Simple Simon Says
game. In each instance (it’s used twice), you have to imitate the
moves of another character to achieve a task, rather like a dance.
There are only six controls used in this, so it’s not too difficult.

Conclusions

Well, that was fun,
wasn’t it? After less than five hours the game is complete! This
might explain why this review is also quite short. Okay, I admit it;
my reactions are excellent, as after all, I am an amateur juggler in
another existence. So this kind of simple arcade stuff comes quite
easily. Even so, I found this game fun, in the most part – it was
only the platform-game-like section on the toy pile that I found
frustrating. I never was much good at those games.

The game was stable
(apart from the reproducible crash-to-desktop during the
introductory movie, which was a shame), and mostly bug free, though
there were some stuttery sound effects and graphical glitches.

The Polar Express has a
surprising degree of replayability – this is probably down to the
simple fun that can be had from the sections; once you’ve completed
the game, you can go back into any chapter and play just a part of
the game.

The only thing stopping
me from grading this game higher are those glitches and the length
of the game.

Purple Bear
says

The Polar
Express is a very fun game with all the different challenges to do.

And the keys are easy to use, e.g. the space
key is” jump.”

It was hard at times. Some challenges took a
bit more time to do than others, like the rooftop chase.

I like to go back to some bits of the game
because it is so good.

I think the game should be aimed to 9+ because
my 8-year-old sister had quite a bit of trouble on some bits she
tried.